


Fifteen Years

by quigonejinn



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-03
Updated: 2014-01-03
Packaged: 2018-01-07 08:37:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1117801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Red Rooms, cold hearts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fifteen Years

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a bunch of grimdark handwaving about Natasha, the Winter Soldier, Steve, and Clint. It takes the general outline of things from comics canon, mashes it onto the movie canon, and decides that a bunch of other things are true, including:
> 
> 1\. The Red Room, dead and burned and salted to the ground.  
> 2\. Natasha and Bucky have a complicated, difficult relationship.  
> 3\. Natasha and Clint have a complicated, difficult relationship.  
> 4\. Natasha is not a nice person. 
> 
> If you like your Natasha to be nice or even good or to have the characterization she does in the comics, you should re-consider reading this. If you have triggers, you should re-consider reading this. The "Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings" is checked for a reason.

Barton brings you in, and SHIELD debriefs you in stages. 

On the helicopter out of Amsterdam, you ride with your hands cuffed in front of you and your feet chained together. They put a hood on you halfway through the flight, and they keep it on you as they lead you out of the helicopter; you breathe cool, damp outdoor for a few lungfuls -- rain, tarmac, the smell of aviation fuel, wind whipping past the back of your hands, the only bare skin that you have. The SHIELD guards subtly shift their stride, too, making it longer but also matching it to the steps of each other. A military base, you guess, where SHIELD feels out of place, somehow less-dressed in their all-black, tactical outfits and body armor. They want to let the military around them know that they don't _care_. They aren't _nervous_

You file that information away. You strain your ears for hints or clues; they get you indoors and they turn you around a few times, lead you up and down a few alleyways, in a few circles. They catch on that you are trying to listen, that you are not sufficiently panicking, and this must frighten them, because the next thing you feel is a hand hard against your shoulder keeping you still. You see the edge of the hood lift up, hesitate, and then, there is a needle against your neck. A doctor's voice. "We're going to give you an injection," she says. 

A sedative. No, a tranquilizer. No, a knock-out. It burns in the veins. The edge of the hood drops back down; your legs go out from underneath you, and despite yourself, despite all of your self control, you make a noise before going to the floor in a heap. 

Fifteen years later -- 

...

Fifteen minutes later, thirty minutes later, who knows how long later, you wake. You're sitting in a chair; your hands are chained to the top of the table. Your feet are chained to the legs of the chair, which, in turn, are chained to the legs of the table. The table itself is bolted to the floor, which is polished concrete, and you turn your head around, studying the room. An interrogation room. No windows, of course. No clocks. No furniture except what you're chained to. Camera up in the corner, but no one-way windows that might be breakable, weapons in the hands of an escapee. Similarly, no interrogator's chair that you could somehow manage to wedge under the door or break off a leg and use it as a weapon. 

As much as you can, you angle your head and try to see if there is a drain in the floor. 

It surprises you when Barton comes in, accompanied by two guards, both of them armed, both of them masked, one of them carrying a chair for Barton to sit in. He puts the chair down; Barton sits in it. One of the guards leaves the room; the other takes up a position behind him, and Barton looks tired. The overhead lighting gives his skin a faint greenish tinge, and now that you have a chance to really look him in the face, you revise his age downward. How young does SHIELD let puppies out of the yard? 

He opens up a file. 

"Name?" he says. 

"Natasha Romanov." He doesn't write it down, doesn't so much as take out a pen, and the guard isn't surprised by this, so the room is miked for sound, as well as video. 

"Frequent aliases?"

"Natalie Rushman." You've used that alias before on operations against Britain, but it isn't the most common one you've used against the United States, and you wait for Barton to prompt you. To revisit the question. To look you in the face. To question you on it, but he moves onto what is, clearly, the next question listed on his file. 

"Code name?"

"Black Widow," you say. 

"What were you doing in Amsterdam?" 

You tell him. Again, less than they do already know. You are probing how much they know, trying to assess what they want out of you. Is it information on past events? Heads-up on future events? Confirmation that you are actually the Black Widow and not one of the other female Red Room operatives used by Moscow? You try to judge his reactions to your half-answers, and when the half-answers don't get a rise, you shift to out-and-out lies. Is his lack of a response lack of knowledge about what you've actually done? Or is something else on his mind? He reaches the last of the questions on the sheet in the file, then closes the file and hands the guard the file. The guard leaves. The door closes, and for the first time since coming into the room, he looks you in the face. Really looks you in the face, long enough for his eyes to focus on your facial features, long enough for you to confirm that he has brown eyes and brown lashes. 

He gets up from his seat and walks around the table to you. 

_Ah, here it is_ , you think to yourself, and you almost relax. You let out the breath that you had been holding, slowly, and take a new breath, slow and deep, filling your lungs. Barton comes to a stop about a foot and a half away from you on the left side, and you scootch the chair around, as much as you can, so that it's facing him. The legs of the chair make a noise as they drag on the floor. The chains clink. You keep your eyes fixed on his face the ever moment and half-moment of his way over to you. _They gave orders for torture, possibly to prove that there was no beforehand collusion, possibly to prove loyalty. He had been concerned he could not do it._

_Now he is certain that he can._

You open your mouth and start to breathe quickly, filling your body with oxygen. Adrenaline starts to flow; adrenaline will carry you through the first wave of pain and help you keep your bearings, although it's coming to you more sluggishly than normal because of the aftereffects of the knockout drug, and you realize, belatedly that there is a metallic taste in your mouth. Leftover from the knockout drug. It clouds your mind enough that you're having difficulty recognizing which one it is, to your deep professional shame, and Barton comes over to you. There is nothing in his hands, so you brace for him to either hit you or force your mouth open or bring his thumbs up to your eyes and put unbearable pressure on them or unzip the front of your suit and slide his hand in or -- 

He doesn't do any of those things. 

"You want some water?" he says. 

"Yes," you say, after a moment. So a guard brings in a bottle of water, and Barton takes off the lid -- he isn't stupid, after all -- he puts it in his pocket, and he puts the bottle of water on the table. You reach forward, hands clinking, and bring it to your mouth. He watches you drink. 

Fifteen years later -- 

...

Fifteen years later, an alarm has gone off, and the console set against the bulkhead is chiming. Clint is naked; he still smells like the shower the two of you took before bed, and you are dry-eyed, breathing evenly, as you watch him get out of bed and walk over to the console. The lamp on the bedside table is on, but not the overhead fluorescents. There is a postcard from a weekend that the two of you spent in Miami on the metal bulkhead by the bed, held up with magnets; your jeans are on the floor next to his socks. 

"It's for me," Clint says, then keys his access code into the console. It considers his fingerprints and code, checks the thermal prints of the people in the room, and presents the message he scans it. 

He frowns, and starts getting dressed. 

"Did something happen at the G-40 summit?" you say. 

"Blowback," he says, pulling an undershirt over his head. For a moment, you can't see his face. "From Loki." 

You aren't expecting him and the Captain to land two weeks later with the Winter Soldier, mostly whole, mostly healthy. 

... 

Are you concerned that the Winter Soldier would take your place? 

Why would you be? When SHIELD brought you in in '94, it was the biggest coup they'd had since convincing Howard Stark to work for them. Stark was three years dead in the ground, ten years removed from actually having done anything useful for them once the bottle took hold of him. You were a legitimate victory, even if they had to pretend for the first eight months that Barton had, in fact, put an arrow through your eye in Amsterdam, that the body found in the river had, in fact, been you. The manner in which you came back -- well. 

SHIELD knows your value, and you have demonstrated it over the years. 

“He says he knows you,” Clint says the first night he is back. 

The two of you are sitting in his quarters, because they have a good view out over the ocean. When the Helicarrier isn’t at war, it stays in the water, and with the current bearing, the horizon outside of his window is ablaze with yellow and gold and purple. There is a bottle of red wine open on the round table between the two of you, and he has his right leg propped on your chair. 

“Does he?” You have the stem of a wine glass between your second and third fingers. Technically, Clint is drinking out of a champagne glass because he only had one wine glass. One champagne glass. It just means he gets to refill his glass more often. 

“He does.” Clint looks at you, and you look back at him. 

“Variety of things,” you say. ”Some sniper work. Close quarters work. Spycraft in the field.” You smile a little and put down your glass. 

“Come to bed,” you say and reach down and take Clint's hand. ”I missed you.” 

...

You were, quite possibly, the best work that the Red Room had ever done. There were other Black Widows, both before and after. When you entered the Red Room, it was part of a class of twenty-two other girls. Half of them survived to graduation. None of them were as good as you, and now that the Red Room is gone, burned to the ground and salted, there will never be another one like you. If SHIELD wants to bring the Winter Soldier in, who are you to say no? You can see the logic. He was superb, one of the very few in your class, and it opens up certain options to have two Red Room operatives, one male, one female. What spy agency wouldn't at least make the effort? You've known for years that Fury would love to have a paired set. 

"Does he?" you say to Clint. 

"He does." 

You think about it. “Variety of things," you say. "Some sniper work. Close quarters work. Spycraft in the field.” 

You smile a little and put down your glass. 

“Come to bed,” you say and reach down and take Clint's hand. ”I missed you.” 

Is any word that you've said to Clint a lie?

...

"You haven't been down to see him," Clint says one night, when he is sitting at the desk, working. 

"Should I be going?" You are at the round table, working your way through the briefings that the news digest teams generate; Clint has paperwork, logistics and team scheduling. From the way he flips through it, annoyed, you can tell that it isn't actually sensitive material or anything he wants to read. "Fury and the debriefing team haven't said anything to me." 

Clint also has a chair that swivels, and he turns it around and looks at you. He is wearing a soft gray SHIELD t-shirt and jeans; you're wearing a matching gray shirt, but with an old pair of boxer shorts. Blue and green. It's a look that he likes on you. 

"The Captain goes down every day," he says, which is what you wanted to know in the first place. 

...

One night, you have a dream of burning a hospital to the ground. You did it once; you told Clint the story in in elliptical terms, and he absorbed it well enough to tell Loki about it. Now, you are reliving the full sensory experience: the color of the sky, the green of the trees, the weight of the violin case on your shoulder while climbing the stairs in the building across the way. You were trying to catch a single traitorous would-be defector who had smuggled his daughter into Switzerland. He knew the Red Room would come for him, so he stayed in the hospital around the clock. It was an old building; the daughter was very ill. 

She had cancer. Or was it some disease of the bones? Did she need to have certain organs replaced? 

The rest of the dream is vivid. You go through the memory of chaining all of the exits but one shut and setting official-looking DOOR UNDER REPAIR signs on the sidewalk. You go back to the van and change out of your workman's outfit and put on a skirt, knee-high boots and a neat blouse. A student from the local university, perhaps a musician, with a violin case: you feel the concrete steps under the thin, flexible soles of your boots when you go up the stairs. You feel the rush of air on your face when you open the window facing onto the courtyard; you feel the weight of the rifle against your shoulder. You feel the click of the button when you set off the bomb in an empty room on the top floor, and you can hear the screaming. You can see the flames; you can smell the fire. Either your target would come out of the one exit and you would shoot him, or he would die inside the building. 

You are excited. Eager. You touch the tip of your tongue to your bottom lip, and you wait. 

When the fire trucks arrive, in order to discourage any firefighters from going inside, you set off the second bomb located in the storage unit where the slide development lab keeps its flammable solvents. 

On the whole, you spent comparatively little time being punished by the Red Room: you had a long career, true, but you were good. You came to being a Black Widow relatively young. Consequently, you sleep as soundly as you need to at night, and generally, you do not remember your dreams. On the occasions that you wake in the middle of a REM cycle, in your dreams, you are reliving things you did, rather than things done to you. The night you dream about the hospital, Clint comes back to his quarters late. You are already in bed, sleeping, but you wake when the door opens, but you don't move. You don't sit up to ask him how it went; you don't give any sign of having woken, as you lie, eyes closed, sheets drawn up to your shoulders, listening to him go into the bathroom, undress, shower. Wash his face, brush his teeth. 

He towels his hair dry enough, and eventually, comes into the dark bedroom. He lies down next to you, but does not pull you into his arms or kiss you on the cheek. He stays on his side of the bed. You stay on yours. He stares up at the ceiling, and you keep on breathing in the slow, steady pattern of someone asleep. Eventually, he falls asleep, and you drift back into that half-dream, half-memory of burning down a hospital. 

Two days later, Fury sends word that he wants you to meet with the Winter Soldier. 

...

When you defected to SHIELD, you spent a total of eight months in interrogation. Nobody had ever captured a Red Room agent and kept them long enough to break them. Novel territory, and you didn't have half of the keys yourself. In fact, you couldn't be entirely sure this wasn't an long-game operation, and Fury wasn't close with any of the mutant groups then, so SHIELD didn't have access to skilled telepaths. Now, he does. Now, he has the general road map from you. 

Once he was sure of your loyalties, though, once he was convinced that this was a genuine switch of loyalties -- well. 

You were the Black Widow. James -- from Clint, you learn this was his name before the Red Room -- had been the Winter Soldier. You burned hospitals with sick children and grieving parents trapped inside. Once, the Winter Soldier murdered an entire village, promising them mercy if they turned over the man he was looking for, then murdering them all, one by one, even after they'd given the prisoner up. The field director had said no survivors, and you heard about this and had not thought a thing about it: therefore, how bad does a man have to be before his fellow community of conscienceless murderers gives him the nickname _the Red Butcher_? You tracked him to a small town in Guatemala, and while you weren't driving the bus that plowed into the minivan that he had been driving, you made sure to have a good seat, and in the screaming and flames and chaos afterwards, you walked into the bush where he had dragged himself. 

Fifty, a hundred, two hundred yards in. A long way to go for a man injured as he was. 

He caught a glimpse of your face before the crash; he was terrified. 

"Natasha," he gasps, and his face is contorted with fear. Also possibly pain, because his right arm has been crushed to a pulp and his guts were beginning to spill out of his stomach. There were multiple pieces of bone showing between muscles, but he was still backing away from you. His legs went out from underneath him, and he tried to crawl away from you on three limbs. 

You followed, gun in your hand. 

"Vasily," you say. "I'm supposed to make you an offer to come and join me. 

"Please." He had come to a tree trunk, and he would either have to turn left or right, and you waited for him to make a choice, but he sobbed and turned around and sat down with his bank against the trunk. He held one hand out at you. "I can be useful to you. To Fury. Please. You burned the Red Room. You brought planes and -- " 

You have a gun in your hand. He has stopped trying to get away, accepting that you'll either let him join SHIELD or will kill him, so you could easily shoot him in the head, but you decide against it. You find a dry bit of ground across from him, spread your jacket down, and sit down. 

"Please," he begs. "I heard you offered it to Pyotr, but he turned you down. He was a fool. I'll come in. I'll do whatever you want." 

"A coward to the last, I see," you say to him. 

He makes a noise high in his throat, and his eyes are beginning to fail him, but he looks at you. 

"You're still wearing the -- " He makes another noise, and you look down at your belt. Black, with a buckle that has two red triangles on it. 

"I am," you say and settle against the tree to wait. "Why shouldn't I? I earned it, and then I beat them."

_And now, I'm going to watch you die_. 

He doesn't have an answer for you, and it's Ecuador. It's the jungle. There are bugs; they torment Vasily until it's time for you to move on, and you put him a bullet into his head. 

After you wiped out all of the active agents you could find, you began going after the men behind desks: for fifteen years, you have used your vacation time from SHIELD this way. 

...

When you defected to SHIELD, it was eight months before you burned the Red Room. Nobody had ever captured a Red Room agent and kept them long enough to break them. You were not sure of protocol: after Barton asked you the questions and established baseline responses, the the second-line interrogation team started probing the edges of what they could ask, trying to root out the mental commands that had been stamped into you. It became clear that SHIELD wanted you alive and working for them, that you wanted to live and would accept working for them, but there were hard limitations on what you could tell them, what you could do. Implanted barriers. 

Fury came in to see you. 

You were no longer being chained to the chair and table. You had a cell of your own with a bed bolted to the wall, a toilet and a sink. 

"How are we going to do this?" he said. 

You looked back at him. He was wearing a black leather coat, and you were wearing prisoner chose, a fluorescent orange prison-style jumpsuit with an ankle monitor, and you know the room is set up for gas: if you made a wrong move, they would gas the room, and you would be on the floor before you could put your fingers around Fury's throat. You considered him for another moment. 

"Make it hurt," you say, looking at him. 

Looking back, you realize that was the moment Fury began to respect you: he wasn't sure it would work. He was bucking the Council, to some degree, but the seeds of what comes later later are in that moment. 

"Make it hurt," you say, then add. "And make it last."

It was novel territory. All of it: how many Red Room agents had been beaten in the past fifty years? How many of them had been taken alive? How many of them had managed to commit suicide or escape, or how many of them had dangled themselves in front of Western agencies as prizes, and used greed as a wedge against them? Nobody knows the numbers, because what agency is going to admit to having been beaten by the Red Room if they can avoid it? You didn't have half of the keys yourself; you weren't sure, yourself, that this wasn't a long-buried trigger to bring you in and have you destroy SHIELD from within. 

Fury wasn't close with any of the mutant groups then, so SHIELD didn't have access to skilled telepaths. Now, he does. Now, he has a general road map built on six-odd months of your pain. Your will. They think the Winter Soldier will be circulating in a few weeks, with no time in the infirmary afterwards. 

How do you feel about this? Is this why you refuse to go down to see him? You spent years of your life tracking down every active Red Room agent that you could find; you made offers to most of them, but none of them accepted, and you didn't want to work with the rest. 

What would have you done to the Winter Soldier if he hadn't been in cryogenic storage for twenty years? 

...

Two days after Clint comes to bed and won't say a word to you, Fury asks you to meet with the Winter Soldier. 

...

The name that Steve uses for him is, apparently, _Bucky_. A childhood nickname. They grew up together, which makes you pause for a moment. The guards at the door use it casually, too: Bucky, rather than prisoner, and there are some magazines in there with him. A copy of an almanac too, and you assume Steve provided him with these creature comforts. Convinced Fury. Got it past the guards. After all, Bucky is being housed in essentially, a prison cell. There is a floor-to-ceiling, airtight clear plastic wall between him and the rest of the room. You check the cameras at the corners and the vents for the gas. Substantially similar to the one that you had been in twenty years ago, and there is already a chair set in front of the cell in the middle. 

When you step into the room, he turns around, and you know he watches as you come over to the chair in front of his cell and sits down. He sits down on the edge of the bed: the sleeves of his jump suit are rolled up past the wrists, and you study his left arm. It looks like flesh, but you read the file, and it's plastic skin of over a metal arm. Presumably new and improved over the years. 

"Little sister," he says in Dutch. 

"Bucky," you say in English. 

... 

What would have you done to the Winter Soldier if he hadn't been in cryogenic storage for twenty years? 

It would have been hard tracking him if he hadn't wanted to be found. Nevertheless, he would have come up for air, or he would have been tempted by something someone offered him. It was how you found the Red Butcher, after all. You caught his trail in Cairo after a job that had his bloody footprints all over it, told Clint to tell Fury that you were going to Mallorca for two weeks, and followed the Butcher for four weeks from Cairo to Istanbul to Melbourne, then across the Pacific to Panama City, then to Quito, then onto a bus leaving Machala. You followed him into the jungle and watched him get most of the way to dead before you put a bullet in his brain. 

The Soviet Union had collapsed in on itself. The Red Room had formally announced it was putting its _assets_ up for bid and hire, and what had you been doing in Amsterdam, except killing for money?

You hadn't minded the change, but it did make the practical arrangements easier. 

On moonless night in June, a biplane dropped you in a pasture at the foothills of the Urals. You carried with you some water, a ration bar, some light weaponry, a backpack full of trackers, and the promise of the Council members from Eastern Europe and Asia that they would restrain their governments once the news broke. An unfortunate oil pipeline accident. A processing plant, destroyed in the night. Nobody regrets the destruction of a school of assassins, especially if it means any and all of the surviving assassins themselves went up for grabs. 

You remember stepping foot on the Helicarrier afterwards, the wind from the blades of the helicopter whipping your hair straight back and the Black Widow symbol on your belt like a scalp. 

The Red Room disliked false modesty: you were some of the best work they ever did. 

...

"When you defected, was the Winter Soldier in Amsterdam?" Clint says.

The two of you are in the canteen, sitting across from each other. He is wearing a sleeveless t-shirt and shorts and has just come from the gym. On the TV's overhead, CNN is doing something about dog parks in New York City. 

"No," you say. 

He looks at you, and you reach over and take a french fry from his platter. After a while, he drops the subject and goes back to eating; you finish your food, too, and you don't tell him: _you would never have gotten close enough to draw, let alone give me a chance to defect_.

You don't say: _I would never have survived long enough to say yes._

Maria Hill joins the table, and she and Clint start chatting about the breakdown in the on-ship laundromat. 

...

When Clint picked you up in Amsterdam, you were not working with the Winter Soldier. He was in stasis, being held by the masters for someone who would pay for the cost of thawing him, and nobody would pay that just for a quick wet work in an alleyway, which is what you were on. Really, a sideshow, a warmup for a bigger, more lucrative job three months later in Marseilles. If you had been with the Winter Soldier, Clint would never have gotten close enough to draw on you, let alone make you an offer. The Winter Soldier was good, and the two of you meshed well. He had been one of your trainers in the Red Room -- not when you were learning the basics, but after you graduated to field work. 

In fact, you have a memory of being in Amsterdam with him. Two weeks where you were playing younger sister to his visiting scholar brother at the University of Amsterdam. 

This is the reason why Bucky says _little sister_ to you in Dutch. The Red Room doesn't keep track of birthdays, and long ago, you lost the date of any family celebrations. The Black Widow serum also took normal aging from you, but you guess that in Amsterdam, you looked roughly fifteen or sixteen. You wore black stockings under gray skirts, and your hair is dyed brown. 

...

Banner narrows his eyes. "And your actress buddy, is she a spy too? Do they start that young? 

You say, "I did." 

...

Clint looks back at you. "Have you ever had someone take your brain and play? Pull you out and send something else in? Do you know what it's like to be unmade?" 

There is a moment, just a very brief pause. You look at him, and he is still looking back you. 

You tell him, calmly, "You know that I do." 

...

In the room that you sometimes sleep in with Clint, there is a postcard by the bed. It is held to the bulkhead with magnets, and it's not from Amsterdam. 

Instead, it's from Miami, near where you once spent a month working with Clint, babysitting a man who might or might not have discovered interdimensional travel in a rented warehouse -- your work got significantly weirder after joining SHIELD, in one sense. In another sense, it got far more boring. 

There were two other pairs of agents there for round-the-clock babysitting, but you and Clint couldn't go far: what if something happened? What if things started coming out from the other side of the interdimensional portals that he was opening up? The two of you were the alpha team on this, and accordingly, the two of you do eight hours on, eight hours asleep, eight hours doing something that didn't involve sitting in a van, one person up front with binoculars, the other person in the back staring at the monitoring equipment. 

A week and a half into having exactly eight hours each day, minus transit time, to do something not as intensely boring as sit inside a van, you are walking along a beach twenty minutes away from the warehouse. Clint is next to you; you took your shoes off and have them in your left hand. Casually, you loop your arm through his. He looks over, and he is wearing sunglasses, so you can't see his face; the line of his shoulders indicates that he is a little surprised, but he goes back to walking next to you. 

"Want to go onto the boardwalk?" he says, after about three hundred yards. 

You shrug, and the two of you go up the stairs, arm in arm. 

Two nights later, you knock on the door of his room. The lights are off, but the moon is shining brightly into the room. He pauses for a moment, but he knows it's you. Who else would be standing in his doorway at two in the morning, almost waiting for permission to come in, and when he says nothing for another three, four seconds, you come in. You close the door. 

You take off your shirt and slide into the bed next to him. 

....

You leave before the morning, but when the job is over, the two of you put in for a weekend off the Helicarrier and drive to Miami. These days, almost fifteen years later, you sleep in his quarters an average of four nights out of seven. He likes to pull you into his arms and kiss you on the cheek. You dream about murder in the jungle and killing on dry grasslands underneath mountains. You spent close to fifty years killing under orders; you spent fifteen years occasionally killing under orders, occasionally killing for personal motivations. 

"Regimes fall every day," you tell Loki. 

...

"Little sister," James says to you across the table. 

"Older brother," you say back. 

Three weeks later, he is sitting in the canteen, reading a newspaper and laughing with Steve Rogers.

**Author's Note:**

> All the good ideas in this came from destronomics.
> 
> This was originally written as part of a triptych, where there would be a Winter Soldier segment and a Clint Barton parallel segment. Given that the Cap2 movie is, uh, like, four months away and this has been sitting on my Gdocs untouched for, like, NINE MONTHS, they're unlikely to ever get written.


End file.
